The Ignominious End of the Three Little Pigs

the-other-white-meat-detHere’s another farm image shot by John Capewell of Westville, NJ from early in the 20th century. I apologize to my more sensitive readers for this grisly image, but this was and is a fact of life for farmers. Just as they tended their own crops in the fields of Southern New Jersey, they slaughtered and butchered their own meat.

I’m not sure who owned the farm or butchered the pigs. One of Capewell’s brothers owned a farm and there were enough farms in and around Westville to support the feed store in this photo.

Below is the entire glass negative.

the-other-white-meat

About The Capewell Glass Negative Collection

The Capewell Glass Negative Collection is a series of about 200 5-inch by 7-inch glass negatives shot early in the 20th Century by John Batt Capewell (1878-1951) of Westville, New Jersey. John passed the negatives down to his son Henry who left them in his wife’s possession upon his passing. Henry’s widow didn’t know what to do with them and didn’t particularly want them so she offered them to my Dad who couldn’t turn down anything. Ultimately I wound up with them and thought I would one day have photographic prints struck from them. That didn’t happen, but I came up with the digital workaround of placing the negatives on a lightbox and rephotographing them with a digital camera. The “processing” was then done on a computer with image editing software. They came out better than I thought they would so I thought I would show them off to the world on this site. Many of these pictures have not been seen in a century, and I’m proud to be presenting them today.

At first, I did not know who the people were in the photographs. I have a box of ephemera that accompanied the negatives and snagged a few clues from that as far as the Capewell name. I did some research on the internet and had a few false starts and wrong turns, but the readers of these posts have provided a remarkable amount of research and detail. I’m amazed at what people have turned up sifting through public records and such!

DSCN1380-negLast: Two Deer

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